It stretches forth into the future, with regard to which we have parables, promises, visions, warnings, all pointing to a continuously progressive growth till the perfect manifestation of the Kingdom of Christ be reached.

Thus the Incarnation supplies the unifying principle, and in its light we catch some ray of hope on the dark problem of suffering.

In consequence of sin our Lord was a sufferer, even in some mysterious sense was “made perfect through suffering” (Heb. ii. 10).

The climax came in the “full, perfect, and complete sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world” made upon the Cross.

It is suggestive that these words should occur in the Consecration Prayer of the Holy Communion Service, as if to remind us that our true spiritual and commemorative sacrifice draws all its validity, power, and preciousness from the one offering of Christ made by Himself in His death.

Thus we see that most essential act for our salvation was not one of victory, triumph, or glory, as the world reckons these things.  Oh, no!  It was one of absolute self-surrender, involving untold anguish of soul and body.  The results of the sufferings of our Lord have justified their tremendous cost.

Its efficacy consisted not in the physical pains, but in the entire yielding up of the will.  Thus it represents for us that victory over self which is the only path to eternal life.

But this victory, even now in these emphatically feather-bed days, is always more or less painful.  In the early times it meant persecution, poverty, isolation, death, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

It is always so; the greatest deeds the world has ever known, nationally, or individually, have been wrought out by suffering; because suffering, more than any other agent, deepens character.

Look around among your friends and acquaintances.  Who are the morally strongest?  To whom do you turn in your times of difficulty, doubt, trouble?  Not to those whose lives have been easy, to whom the lines have fallen in pleasant places, to whom success has come without effort!  No!  You turn to the one who has fought his way through the doubt, the difficulty, the trouble, and you find a tower of strength.  There is the secret of Charles Kingsley’s power as a counsellor; once he did not believe that there was a God; he went through the agonies of doubt.

There is the secret of the wondrous force of Archbishop Temple.  Rough, rugged, almost discourteous at times; hating shams and penetrating them with an unerring instinct, but tenderness itself to the really distressed.  He knew what it was as a lad to do field labour in poor clothes and with insufficient food.  In later years, when up at College, he was wont to study by the light in the passage, because he could not afford oil for his own lamp.

Yet another illustration, showing the directly spiritual influence of suffering—­those countless cases of bed-ridden invalids, often in intense pain, who develop an intense, fervent, yet restful piety, seldom attained even by the most devout in active life.